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2016 has been the year of retrogaming comeback with products like PocketCHIP, Nintendo NES Classic, GPD Win and quite a few other projects. There will soon be a new option with RetroEngine Sigma, an inexpensive Linux based retro-gaming console based on Allwinner H3 processor.

The specifications look similar, so I went to my little list of Allwinner H3 boards, found the specs matches closely Orange Pi Lite board, and after checking the video and more picture, the ports also happen to be exactly in the same place… So it’s pretty sure the console is based on Shenzhen Xunlong’s Orange Pi Lite board, which is cool since there’s a good community support.

RetroGame developers leveraged that, and the console supports Atari 2600/7800, Sega Genesis, Nintendo NES / 64, Amstrad, Sega, and many more, and can be used as a mini computer and a media player with Kodi. It seems to have the same features as RetrOrangePi firmware based on Armbian plus Kodi and various game emulator.

The mini console’s Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign has been very successfully so far as they’ve raised closed to $250,000 from over 3,000 backers. All early bird rewards are gone, but you can still pledge $59 for the “Speedy Backer” reward including a mini console with a 16GB micro SD card pre-loaded with the firmware, a power adapter, a dual stick analog controller, a micro USB card reader, and a Xmas voucher. The 32GB micro SD Deluxe version goes for $89, and adds a Bluetooth adapter, a Bluetooth game controller, and a HDMI cable. Shipping adds $7 to the US, and $15 to the rest of the world. Delivery is scheduled for April to June 2017, but you’ll first receive a Christmas Gift voucher.

Qualcomm has announced commercial sampling of Qualcomm Centriq 2400 series server SoC built with 10nm FinFET process technology and featuring up to 48 Qualcomm Falkor custom ARMv8 CPU cores “highly optimized to both high performance and power efficiency, and designed to tackle the most common datacenter workloads”.

Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies demonstrated the new processor in a Live demo showing Apache, Spark, Java, and Hadoop on Linux running on a SBSA compliant server powered by Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor, but the company did not provide any further technical details or preliminary benchmark results for the solution.

The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor series is now sampling to select customers and is expected to be commercially available in H2 2017. That’s about all we know from the press release. However, Linaro have been working on Qualcomm Technologies QDF2432 based boardfor several months with support for Debian 8.x ‘Jessie’ and CentOS 7 operating systems, as well as Hadoop and OpenStack. It’s not 100% clear if this is indeed related to Centriq 2400, albeit the name QDF2432 seems to indicate so, and it would probably have started on some FPGA board to simulate Centriq 2400 (32-core?) processor, unless they had engineering samples for nearly a year. There’s also a basically empty page on Centos.org for “Qualcomm QDF2432 Server Dev Platform”. It’s close to impossible to find much details since those things are developed under NDAs.

Last week-end I installed ESPurna open source firmware with MQTT server on Sonoff POW WiFi switch, and the next step is find a way to draw power consumption charts in some web based interface. We could do this in the IoT cloud with services like Xively or ThingSpeak, but since one of the goals of replacing the default firmware was not to rely on a proprietary cloud based solution, I decided to find a way to draw those chart in a local server, and it so happens that ThingSpeak is also open source with the code available on Github. Hardware platforms like NanoPi NEO / NEO Air, or Orange Pi Zero boards appear to be particularly well suited for the task of running an MQTT broker and Thingspeak, but at first I wanted to install ThingSpeak in my own Ubuntu 16.04 computer to have a try.

Click to Enlarge

As you can see from the screenshot above I manage to do it, but it requires a bit more efforts than expected, as the project has not been updated since 2015, and does not work out of the box with the latest operating system.

It’s recommended to change the username and password in config/database.yml for test, development and production databases with your own for security purpose. Once it’s done, let’s try to create the databases:

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rake db:create

Sadly it starts with an error:

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rake aborted!

Bundler::GemRequireError:There was an error whiletrying toload the gem'mysql2'.

Damn a permission error. I could not find a proper fix, so at this point the title of the post should possibly become “How NOT to install Thingspeak in Ubuntu 16.04”, as although it will work, the steps below makes the installation insecure since I simply give full databases’ access to thing user. But that will do since I’ll only use it in my LAN, and maybe somebody will point to a secure solution to the issue.

[Update: Thanks to Arthur, I’ve got a more secure solution . I’ve left both insecure and secure workaround for reference, but obviously you should use the secure one, especially it’s not hard]

Insecure (don’t use it, I just left it to show what you should not do):

Now start your web browser and you can access your local Thingspeak installation @ http://localhost:3000.
I’ll now have to study a little more about Thingspeak, install MQTT, as well as one of the MQTT to Thingspeak bridges available on the web, and see if I can plot power consumption data there.

While it’s quite easy to find displays for development boards, they do not always come with a case, so you’d have to make your own. One easier option for the Raspberry Pi boards is the official Raspberry Pi 7″ LCD touch screen Display, plus RS Premium touchscreen case that selling for $132 in total including Raspberry Pi 3 board. But Hardkernel has now launched their own ODROID-VU8C 8″ Touch Display Shell Kit compatible with ODROID-C1+ and ODROID-C2 boards.

Specifications and Kit Contents:

8-inch TFT-LCD with 1024×768 resolution (4:3 ratio)

10 finger capacitive touch input

Back-light brightness control with ODROID GPIO PWM

Viewing angle : Left 75, Right 75, Up 75, Down 75 degree

Screen Dimensions : 189 x 149 x 29 mm

Viewable screen size : 162 x121.5 mm (active area)

Power Supply – 5V/4A DC to power barrel (powering both the LCD and ODROID ARM Linux board)

You’ll have to provide your own ODROID-C1+ or ODROID-C2 board, micro SD card or eMMC module, and assemble the kit. Bear in mind that after assembly, it’s not possible, or rather not convenient, to remove the micro SD card or eMMC module. It works with both Android and Linux operating system, but you’ll have to make sure you use a recent version of the firmware (Linux 3.10.80-128 or higher) and change boot.ini file to 1024×768 (60Hz) resolution (setenv m “1024x768p60hz”) and DVI mode (setenv vout_mode “dvi”). The hardware design is interesting as they’ve used a DVI to RGB converter and a RGB to LVDS converter, instead of just a DVI to LVDS converter, maybe because it’s hard to find?

ODROID-VU8C Block Diagram

If you still want to access the 40-pin GPIO header in the panel, you can do so easily through the “cutting line ” on the case.

ODROID-VU8C sells for $90 on Hardkernel website, to which you’d need to add about $32/$40 for ODROID-C1+/C2 board, and shipping. If you’re based in North America, it will be better to purchase the kit from Ameridroid instead, Alternatively the company has other 5″ and 7″ display solutions for their board, but AFAIK there’s no specific case.

The board will be used in NUC6CAYH Kit with power adapter, no memory, no eMMC, no OS, as well as NUC6CAYS Kit with power adapter, preinstalled with 2GB 1600MHz SO-DIMM, and 32GB eMMC with Microsoft Windows 10 Home.

The specifications mention that Microsoft Windows 10 Home and Microsoft Windows 10 Pro operating systems are supports, and that “other operating system (OS) support may be available”. It’s very likely Linux be supported, and if you plan to run Linux the barebone kit is probably more suitable albeit you’ll lose the eMMC flash, and instead would have to install the OS on a SATA SSD or hard drive.

The other things that’s unclear right now are the price and availability for the new NUCs, but the wait should be almost over.

Firefly-RK3399 is the first, and for now the only one, development board equipped with the latest Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core Cortex A72 & A53 processor. It’s just not available yet, but the board has now been launched on Kickstarter where it is offered for $139 to $199 depending on options.

The company will provide Android 6.0.1 and Ubuntu 16.04 firmware images for the board, including a dual boot image. There are also work-in-progress documentation and placeholder links to Android SDK and schematics in the product page which will hopefully soon link to the actual documents and files, as well as a work-in-progress Wiki. It may also be worth monitoring the company’s Github account.

The company aims to raise $50,000 from the crowdfunding campaign, and you’d have to pledge $139 to get “Firefly-RK3399 Development Kit” with 2GB RAM, and 16GB flash together with a 12V/2A power adapter, a USB Type C adapter, a USB to UART serial board, a USB cable, and a a cooling fan (I assume with an heatsink). After the 50 first pieces, the price goes up to $159, and if you want the “Plus development kit” with 4GB RAM and 32GB flash, you’d need to pledge $199 instead. Shipping adds $5 to $30 depending on the destination country, and delivery is planned for March 2017.

NXP has just announced a modular IoT gateway solution for large node networks (>= 250 nodes) based on Volansys i.MX6UL system-on-module, supporting wireless communications protocols such as Thread, ZigBee, NFC through add-on modules, on top of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1.

So you can select your own i.MX6UL module with the amount of memory and storage needed, and add wireless modules as needed to match your requirements. Volansys is also planning for LoRaWAN and Sigfox modules in the future. Beside the hardware, the gateway and modules all come with various software stack and documentation: A Yocto Linux BSP with drivers, an MQTT client library, a Thread Linux host software SDK, Thread and Zigbee device controller, registration with the cloud, and more. The companies also provide an Android app to manage the gateway, and firmware for Thread Kinetis KW4x end device. Alternative operating systems supported include OpenWRT and Brillo.

You’d think Cyber Monday should be over by now, but ITEAD Studio still has a clearance with real 70% discount, as 96Boards hardware compliant LeMaker Hikey board is now sold for just $29.70 instead of the usual $99 price.